The Curse of the Crying Boy Paintings

Handle with Care: It Might Help to Get a Crying Girl

In the early 1980s, British firefighters were coming across an odd phenomenon that was occurring a little too frequently for their taste. At various house fires where everything in the house was destroyed and charred, they had been finding paintings of a wide-eyed sorrowful boy with a tear rolling down each cheek that had not so much as a scorch mark on them! These paintings somehow were the only items to come through each fire virtually unscathed.

The artwork became news and The Curse of The Crying Boy Paintings was born when firefighter, Peter Hall, talked about these eerie events to the British tabloid, The Sun. On September 4, 1985, an article was published relating the strange tale. The Crying Boy paintings were mass produced – many people owned one. Once the first article debuted, The Sun’s phone lines were flooded with folks calling in to tell of their own horrific experiences, and how their homes had burned down sometime after they acquired a Crying Boy. Some said they had often suspected the painting was a jinx, and one woman even claimed to have tried to burn it unsuccessfully.

Tales explaining The Curse of The Crying Boy began to spring up with alacrity. Some said the painter had mistreated the boy who was an orphan. Others said the boy set the fires because his parents had died in a fire and he was either acting out the trauma or had been responsible for the fire that left him orphaned to begin with. Psychics claimed the boy’s spirit was trapped in the painting. One woman said there would be no trouble if one kept the picture next to a painting of a Crying Girl. A male stripper called Big Doofer, whose real name was Adrian Martin, claimed the curse struck him when he suffered facial burns during his fire eating act. He blamed it on the painting because he said he had made the mistake of making fun of his wife’s Crying Boy not too long before appearing onstage.